The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

I understood all this travelling upstream under the glowing blue sky and warm rays of the sun, earth flowering around me. I understood all this for nothing refreshes and liberate a man’s mind better than a long journey without important duties, separated from his old surroundings in solitude. Thinking about myself, I was ashamed, for my wealth had corrupted me and made me sated in Akhetaten, and my travels to Syria had corrupted me and made me high and mighty and self-conscious, believing that I knew how realms were governed and nations guided to alliances with one another. Also the company of the Babylonian ambassador had corrupted me and filled me with a more earthly wisdom — for thinking of him opened my eyes, and I knew that the wisdom of Babylon was an earthly wisdom, and its purpose was earthly.

They did not read the divine in man from the sheep liver, but they read the man’s deeds, his success and marriages and the number of his children and crimes — but they did not read the man’s heart. Stars revolved around the firmament according to their accurate calculations, and they fit the stars to their calculations according to their will and read from the stars the size of harvest and floods and the reigns of Kings and collapses of realms, but they did not read from the stars the divine in man, and so their skill was not divine. Thinking all this, the journey upstream made me humble again, and I bowed my head before the god who lived in me and in everyone and whom Pharaoh Akhenaten called Aten and the only god. But I lacked his will and courage. Therefore I bowed my head before my unexplored heart and confessed that there are as many gods as there are human hearts in the world. Yet I believed there are people who wander from birth to grave never knowing the god in their heart. And this god was not knowledge and understanding but he was more than knowledge and understanding.

Therefore I believed what I hoped, and I rejoiced greatly in my heart for the sake of my own thoughts, feeling that I was a good man and a better man than many others. If I was to be honest with myself and live in truth, I must confess that I felt in my heart myself to be a better man than Pharaoh Akhenaten himself, since I harmed no one willingly nor forced my faith upon anyone, and in the days of my youth I had tended the poor without requiring gifts. As I pursued my way up the river and pulled up on the shore in the evenings to stay overnight on

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the ship, I saw the traces of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s god everywhere. Though it was now the height of the sowing season, half of the fields in Egypt lay unploughed, unsown and without seeds; and weeds and thistles were growing on the fields, and the flood waters had filled the ditches with mud that no one had cleared away.

Amun was testing his powers over the hearts of men, driving the settlers from his former lands and also cursing Pharaoh’s fields, so that slaves and ploughmen fled from Pharaoh’s fields fearing Amun’s curse and hiding themselves in the cities. A few of the settlers remained in their huts, scared and bitter, and I spoke with them and said, “You mindless people, why do you not plough and sow for otherwise you will starve to death when the winter comes.”

They looked at me with enmity because my clothes were of the finest linen and answered, “Why should we sow, when the bread that grows in our fields is accursed bread, killing those who eat it as the speckled grain has already killed our children?” So remote lay the city of Akhetaten from the life of reality that it was only now I had learned that the speckled grain caused the death of children. I had not heard of such a sickness before but it had spread from child to child, and children’s bellies swelled, and they died moaning pitifully, and neither physicians nor sorcerers could help them even though peasants had resorted to sorcerers, as is their custom. It seemed to me, however, that this sickness could not originate from the grain but rather from the flood waters whence came all the infectious diseases of winter — although it is true that this one didn’t kill adults but only children — but when I surveyed the grown people who dared not to sow their fields, preferring to submit to death by famine, I saw that the illness had killed their hearts. I did not blame Pharaoh Akhenaten for all I saw, but Amun, who so poisoned the lives of people with fear so that death was better for them than life.

Sailing upstream towards Thebes, I saw everything with open eyes: in abundant lands where fields were ploughed and sowed and seeds treaded to the mud, I saw slaves cursing their lords and servants murmuring against their masters, foreheads sweating and stick marks in their backs. In my heart, this injustice was not different from the injustice of Aten’s unsown fields or the injustice of thistles on fertile

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